4 June 2014Germany opens inquiry into claims NSA tapped Angela Merkel's phone
Unexpected inquiry, announced by federal prosecutor, will determine if US actively listened in to calls
By Philip OltermannThe Guardian

Federal prosecutor Harald Range announced on Wednesday:
"I informed parliament's legal affairs committee that I
have started a preliminary investigation over tapping of a
mobile phone of the chancellor."

Merkel had complained to Barack Obama in person about
the alleged tapping of her phone last October, but the
federal court's investigation, which will be against
unnamed persons, would constitute the first formal response
to the affair. The German government has reportedly
announced its support for the investigation.

The Karlsruhe-based court's decision comes as a
surprise, not least since it appeared that both the German
and the US governments had over recent months successfully
calmed the waves stirred up by the revelations.

During Merkel's visit to Washington in May, the
NSA affair had been largely sidelined by the
Ukrainian crisis, and an attempt to invite
Edward Snowden as a witness to the Bundestag's own
inquiry into NSA surveillance appeared to have been
successfully
blocked by members of Merkel's own government, with the
justification that an invitation would have put a "grave
strain" on US-German relations.

Only a few days ago, several media outlets had reported
that the federal prosecutor's investigation too would be
dropped. The considerable public outrage about the
information leaked by
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – evoking memories
of the Stasi's state surveillance among many German
citizens – appeared to have ebbed away.

The key issue for the prosecution will be to establish
whether the
NSA monitored the German chancellor's mobile
automatically or by default, as the US government has so
far implied, or whether individual agents were actively
engaged in tapping her calls, as German tabloid Bild claims
on Thursday.

The latter would constitute a clear breach of German law
on German soil according to paragraph section 99 of the
German criminal code.

The federal prosecution has stated that it has currently
no plans to look into the alleged wider surveillance of
German citizens through US intelligence services, a
decision which some politicians have been quick to
criticise.

Social Democratic party politician Ralf Stegner told
Handelsblatt newspaper: "Orwell's 'All animals are equal
but some animals are more equal than others' can't be the
right motto when dealing with a massive and mass-scale
breach of civil rights".

However, Range stated that the scope of the
investigation could be widened if the federal prosecutor
were to obtain new evidence relating to general
surveillance.

Konstantin von Notz, a Green party MP and member of the
Bundestag's
NSA inquiry committee, welcomed the federal court's
move but suggested that it should eventually be broadened
out to include surveillance of normal citizens.

"I assume that the tapping of
Angela Merkel's cell phone must have involved active
decisions by real people, whereas the monitoring of 80
million Germans would have been a matter of algorithms and
people analysing the results. Both actions amount to
violations of German law. Whether you have a human being or
a computer opening and scanning your letters for individual
words, it's the same thing, because government authorities
have gained this information," von Notz said.